Executive Assistant Cost: Human EA vs AI Assistant in 2026

A full-time human executive assistant costs $65,000 to $88,000 a year fully loaded, or $31 to $42 per hour once benefits and overhead are counted. A managed virtual assistant service runs $1,380 to $2,600 a month. An AI assistant runs $149 to $399 a month.

Those three numbers frame the whole decision. Below is where each figure comes from, a full cost table, an honest account of what each option can and cannot do, and a worked example for a 10-person office. The short version: these are three different products at three different price points, and the mistake is buying the wrong tier for the work you actually have.

Where the numbers come from

Human EA. US salary data puts the median executive assistant base salary at roughly $70,000, with typical small-company hires landing between $52,000 and $70,000 base depending on market. Base salary is not the cost, though. Add employer payroll taxes (~7.65% FICA plus unemployment), benefits (health insurance for a single employee commonly runs $7,000 to $9,000 a year employer-paid), paid time off, equipment, software seats, and recruiting. The standard rule of thumb is that a full-time employee costs 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary. Applied to a $52,000 to $63,000 base, that yields roughly $65,000 to $88,000 per year loaded, or $31 to $42 per hour across ~2,080 paid hours.

Managed VA service. Services like Belay, Prialto, and Time etc sell fractional human assistants in blocks of hours. Realistic pricing in 2026 clusters around $33 to $46 per hour at the quality tier a business should actually use. A 40-hour-a-month engagement runs about $1,380 to $1,850; 60 hours pushes toward $2,600. The hours are capped: when the block is used, the work stops or the bill grows.

AI assistant. An AI executive assistant like Officeagent runs $149 to $399 a month depending on volume. It schedules meetings, triages and drafts email, tracks tasks and follow-ups, summarizes meetings, and handles data entry, with a human approving anything that goes out. There are no capped hours and no nights-and-weekends premium, because there are no hours at all.

The full cost table

One row of honesty about that last cell: the approval requirement is not a limitation we apologize for. AI drafts, a human approves. An AI assistant that sends whatever it wants under your name is a liability, not a product.

When a human EA is the right call

If any of these describe the role, hire the person and do not overthink it:

• Complex judgment and discretion. Handling a board member's temper, knowing which meeting to bump when two VIPs collide, sensing that an email should be a phone call. A great EA runs on context no system fully captures.
• In-person work. Greeting clients, managing an office, wrangling an event, being physically present. Software does not do rooms.
• Relationship management. When the assistant is effectively the executive's proxy to investors, clients, and staff, the relationship itself is the job.
• Heavy live phone work. Negotiating with a hotel at midnight, charming a gatekeeper, calming an upset customer in real time.
• A genuinely full 40-hour week of mixed work. If one executive generates that much varied support work, the loaded cost is simply the price of doing business, and it is worth it.

A strong EA supporting a busy CEO routinely returns multiples of their cost in recovered executive time. Nothing below argues otherwise.

When the AI assistant wins

• The work is volume, not judgment. Scheduling ping-pong, inbox triage, routine replies, meeting summaries, follow-up chasing, data entry. This is most of what actually fills an assistant's day at a small company, and it is exactly what software does without fatigue.
• You need coverage, not headcount. Requests at 11pm get handled at 11pm. No PTO gaps, no sick days, no two-week notice that takes your calendar system with it.
• You cannot justify $65,000+. Most companies under ~25 people cannot. The realistic alternative to an AI assistant at this size is not a human EA. It is the founder doing admin at night, which is the most expensive assistant on the market.
• Hours caps keep biting. If your VA block runs out by the 20th of the month, you are paying human rates for machine-shaped work.
• Several people need help, not one. A human EA supports one or two executives well. An AI assistant does not care how many inboxes and calendars it watches.

The honest hybrid, common among our customers: an AI assistant for the volume layer, plus either a fractional human for judgment work or an EA upstream whose time the AI stops wasting on scheduling emails.

Worked example: a 10-person office

Take a 10-person professional services firm. Nobody has an assistant; admin is smeared across everyone. A realistic weekly tally:

• Scheduling back-and-forth across the team: ~5 hours
• Inbox triage and routine replies: ~8 hours
• Meeting notes and circulating action items: ~4 hours
• Chasing follow-ups and unanswered threads: ~3 hours
• Data entry, CRM logging, document filing: ~5 hours

Call it 25 hours a week of admin, spread across people whose loaded time averages $55 an hour. That is about $1,375 a week, or roughly $71,500 a year of professional time spent on admin. Note that this is coincidentally the price of a loaded EA, which is why firms this size feel the pain but hesitate at the hire.

Now the three options against that baseline:

• Hire an EA at ~$75,000 loaded. Absorbs most of the 25 hours and adds real judgment. Net cost roughly break-even against recovered time, but it is a big fixed commitment, a hiring process, and a single point of failure for a firm of ten.
• VA service at ~$1,850/month (40 hrs). Covers 10 hours a week, about $22,000 a year. Helps, but 40 hours a month against a 100-hour-a-month problem leaves most of it in place, and the capped hours go first to whoever shouts loudest.
• AI assistant at $399/month. About $4,800 a year. Suppose it only handles the mechanical 60% of that admin (15 of the 25 hours), with humans approving drafts in a few minutes a day. That is ~$42,900 of professional time recovered for $4,800, roughly a 9x return, before counting faster response times. The remaining judgment-heavy 10 hours stay human, as they should.

The numbers will differ at your firm, but the structure of the answer rarely does: below a certain volume of judgment work, the AI-first option wins on math, and above it, the human wins on everything math cannot see.

Costs people forget to count

Whichever option you price, four costs rarely make the spreadsheet:

• Ramp time. A human EA takes about 90 days to reach full speed, which is a quarter of loaded salary spent learning your world. A VA match resets partway whenever the provider rotates staff. An AI assistant ramps in days but still needs its rules corrected for the first couple of weeks.
• Turnover. Median assistant tenure is a few years at best. When a human leaves, the calendar logic, contact quirks, and unwritten preferences leave too. Software retains its configuration.
• Management overhead. A human report needs one-on-ones, reviews, and direction. Delegating well is a skill, and executives who lack it get poor returns from any human option.
• The cost of nothing. The most common choice is no assistant at all, which means senior people doing $40-an-hour work at $150-an-hour rates. Price that honestly before comparing the other three.

The bottom line

An executive assistant costs $65,000 to $88,000 a year loaded, a VA service $16,500 to $31,000, and an AI assistant $1,800 to $4,800. Buy the human when the job is judgment, presence, and relationships. Buy the AI when the job is volume, speed, and coverage. If it is only the meetings side you are pricing, the narrower breakdown of what an AI meeting assistant costs runs the same math for that one slice. Many offices eventually run both, and the ones that get it wrong are usually paying human prices for work a machine should have been drafting all along.

If you want to see what the low end of that table actually does in practice, look at how our AI office assistant handles scheduling, email, and follow-ups with your approval on every send, and compare plans on the pricing page against the hours your team loses now.